A GeekDad and Son Make the Ultimate Star Wars Fan’s Pilgrimage

Photo: Matt Blum

I’ve been hooked on Star Wars for nearly as long as anyone could have been, and on science fiction movies in general since I was very young. It’s been incredibly gratifying to me as a parent to see both of my kids embrace many of my geeky interests, and doubly so in the case of Star Wars— three Halloweens ago, without any prompting, they decided to go as Darth Vader and Princess Leia, and the geek-fatherly pride I felt nearly made me tear up. So you can imagine how I felt when I received an invitation to visit Skywalker Ranch and Lucasfilm’s headquarters on a junket for the upcoming release of The Phantom Menace in 3D, and to bring one of my kids with me. The fact that it was the weekend of my son’s 11th birthday made it all the sweeter.

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My son and I arrived in San Francisco on Friday night, January 27, to find an Ultimate FX lightsaber on the hotel room bed with a note on it instructing us to bring it with us the next day to the ranch. It was late — particularly for us, as we’d flown in from the East Coast — but of course we had to take the lightsaber out of its package and make sure it worked. You know, just in case it was defective.

The next day we were taken, along with a group of other blogger parents and kids including Andrea Schwalm of GeekMom and her son, to Skywalker Ranch. It was a beautiful day, and the view approaching and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was breathtaking. But you can see San Francisco Bay any day, so the coolness of seeing Alcatraz was quickly eclipsed in our minds by the knowledge that we would soon be going where (relatively) few geeks have gone before.

There isn’t room here to talk about everything we saw and did there, but the highlights were:

Seeing the Skywalker Ranch fire trucks. They maintain their own fire station, as the ranch is pretty far removed from any municipal emergency services. Their station, they said, mostly responds to calls from their neighbors. This was especially interesting for my son because his uncle, my brother-in-law, is a firefighter.

Playing Kinect Star Wars. I’d played it a bit at San Diego Comic-Con back in July, and had been a bit underwhelmed by it, so I was glad to see it was vastly improved. My son and I spoke extensively with Craig Derrick, LucasArts Producer, about the game, and my son got the chance to play it for a while. The favorite part of the game for the kids seemed to be playing a rancor on Naboo, rampaging about destroying things and eating people to gain health. This game is going to be huge.

Meeting Matthew Wood of Skywalker Sound, who does the voices of General Grievous and the battle droids. He had the kids come up, one at a time, and dubbed in droid-ified versions of their voices into a scene snippet from Phantom Menace. He told my son that the chair he was sitting in was the one George Lucas usually sits in when doing sound selection/editing.

Meeting Concept Model Artist John Goodson, who told us the story of how he wrote countless letters to Lucasfilm as a kid asking to work there, and how after college he got hired there. I know my son took away the message that, if there’s something you really want to do with your life, you shouldn’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it.

Lightsaber training with master ObiShawn. I don’t think my son stopped grinning the entire time the training lasted, and frankly I had more fun watching him and the other kids train than I could possibly have had being trained myself. I did find it remarkable that all the kids won their duels against ObiShawn — quite a coincidence, really!

On the way home from the ranch, I discovered that there are few things quite as excruciating as having a bad migraine headache while on an hour-long bus ride at night with eight kids, each holding (and playing with) a bright, noisy lightsaber. But even that wasn’t enough to offset the thorough awesomeness of the day.

If only this had been in the movies! Photo: Matt Blum

The following day we were taken to Lucasfilm’s headquarters, which used to be at the ranch but are now at their offices in San Francisco’s Presidio. Here we had a short group interview with Derrick, Wood, and Goodson, whom we’d met the day before — read my article tomorrow for a few details gleaned from this session. The interview was followed by the highlight of the day, for me at least: A tour of Industrial Light and Magic (whose headquarters are also there). We saw models, props, matte paintings, and the occasional animatronics from so many famous and beloved movies (not to mention quite a few less famous or beloved movies) that I could barely keep up with them. I somehow managed to avoid a complete geek-out when I realized I was standing two feet away from the actual Han Solo in carbonite prop from The Empire Strikes Back, an actual Yoda puppet, and one of the many actual R2-D2s. There was more, even, that we could have seen, but they had to cut our tour short so we could see the movie.

The movie, of course, was the primary reason for the press junket in the first place: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D. I’ll have a full review tomorrow — Friday, February 10 — when the movie opens in theaters, so please come back for that.

After that, it was time to go to the airport for our flight home. We discovered that it is in fact possible to bring a lightsaber as a carry-on on a domestic flight. I was a bit concerned that the TSA folks would ask us to explain it, but, perhaps because with our junket and all the other simultaneous similar junkets for other press groups they’d seen more than a few lightsabers go through security already, they didn’t even blink at it.

My son’s impression of the junket:

I thought that the junket was definitely something worth postponing my birthday party for. One of my favorite parts was getting lightsaber training. Another one of my favorite parts was going to where they create the audio for the Star Wars movies. At the audio area, they recorded each of the kids in my group reading a script, edited it so that it would sound like a battle droid, and replaced the droid voice from the movie with the edited recording. I thought that my recording was funny because I almost gave up in the middle of the recording so when it played it sounded like (I am skipping to the end of it) “Coruscant, uh, that doesn’t compute uh, I can’t! I can’t!”

If you haven’t yet, see the full gallery of my photos from the junket:

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